World News - Withdrawal of extra troops hinges on political progress in Iraq, Gates says

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Bush administration will take into account Iraq's political progress when deciding this summer whether or not to bring home some of the thousands of extra troops the U.S. has sent to tamp down violence there. "Our commitment to Iraq is long term, but it's not a commitment to having our young men and women patrolling Iraq's streets open-endedly," Mr. Gates said at a press conference today. Mr. Gates said he encouraged the Iraqis to pass legislation on political reconciliation and the sharing of oil revenues among the Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. He told the Iraqis he hoped their Council of Representatives would not recess for the summer without passing the legislation. Whether they take action on these measures will be considered when he and the commanders review the military buildup later this summer, Mr. Gates told them.... http://www.washingtontimes.com

United States lawyers will arrive in Fiji next month to take evidence from a former Fijian soldier who claims to have witnessed American private security guards shooting Iraqi civilians for target practice.The Daily Post reports that Isireli Naucukidi is in fear of his life if he goes to America to give evidence.Mr Naucukidi, who served with the American security company Triple Canopy in Iraq, has reported three instances of Iraqi civilians being killed by American security guards employed by the same company on July 8 last year.He says he has been informed that lawyers representing the company and the guards implicated in the shootings will be in Fiji from May 8 to take his evidence....http://www.rnzi.com/pages/news.php?op=read&id=31652

EIGHT British soldiers died on the first day of the Iraq war due to the mechanical failure of a US helicopter - not because of human error, a coroner ruled yesterday. Andrew Walker's findings directly contradicted those of US investigators, who said spatial disorientation suffered by pilots on the aircraft was to blame. The assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire said he had reached his conclusions in spite of an "unacceptable" lack of co-operation with his inquiry by American officialdom. The helicopter, an American Sea Knight, went down south of the Kuwait border in March 2003. The eight victims from 3 Commando Brigade were the first UK casualties of the war. As well as the eight British servicemen, four US personnel died. After yesterday's inquest in Oxford, barrister Paul Spencer, representing the widow of Commando Sgt Les Hehir, said: "There is a litigation risk [for US authorities] now there has been a finding that mechanical failure, not human error, was to blame."...http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=404&id=606872007

KABUL: Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit has said the soldiers of the foreign military accused of crimes will not be prosecuted in Afghanistan. Answering questions from members of the audit and assessment commission of the lower house of parliament, the attorney general said Afghan prosecutor could not interfere in cases pertaining to foreign military. Representative of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said according to their agreement with the Afghan government, foreign soldiers, accused of crimes, would be prosecuted under the laws of their native country. However, parliamentarian Abdul Sattar Khwasi said it was against the law of the land that a soldier committing crime against the Afghan people would not be prosecuted here....http://paktribune.com/news/index.shtml?175671

A class of "failed" star called a brown dwarf emits beams of radiation that are thousands of times brighter than any released by the Sun. The brown dwarfs are behaving like an altogether different and exotic cosmic object called a pulsar. Pulsars are rotating neutron stars that emit a flashing radio signal. When the rotating beams sweep Earth, astronomers detect the radio pulse, which has been likened to the rotating beacon of a lighthouse. Pulsars are created when a massive star explodes in a supernova and its core collapses into a rapidly spinning neutron star. Brown dwarfs, on the other hand, are stellar also-rans which lack the necessary mass to kick-start nuclear fusion reactions in their cores. Greg Hallinan from the National University of Ireland in Galway and his colleagues used the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico to observe a very cool, rapidly rotating brown dwarf called TVLM 513-46546. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6574433.stm

Bush and fellow Republicans struggled on Thursday with comparisons between the U.S. wars in Iraq and Vietnam as the Senate's top Democrat declared the Iraq war lost. A day after a White House meeting with lawmakers failed to resolve differences over whether to attach a troop withdrawal plan to a war funding bill, Bush and the Democrats continued their feud from afar. Asked to compare Iraq to Vietnam, a war that still weighs on the American psyche three decades after it ended, Bush told an Ohio audience a premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq could lead to chaos and death the same way war broke out between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia after the fall of Saigon in 1975. "After Vietnam, after we left, millions of people lost their life. My concern is there would be a parallel there," Bush said, adding that "This time around, the enemy wouldn't just be content to stay in the Middle East, they'd follow us here."...http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N19440243.htm